Reviewed this week

NEW ARTS FESTIVAL: Honoring Leonard

Birmingham's Community House will be the site of the first Elmore Leonard Literary Arts and Film Festival, set for Nov. 10-13.

The festival, created to honor Michigan novelist Leonard and his contributions to the worlds of fiction and film, will include a competition for screenwriters and filmmakers as well as a short story contest for students ages 13-18. Entries for the screenwriting and film competition will be accepted July 1-Sept. 7. They must be in the crime or mystery genre and must reference a Michigan location.

For more on the event, contact the Community House at 248-554-6586 or go to elmoreleonardliteraryartsandfilmfestival.com.

LONG-LOST SILENT FILMS: 'Upstream' uncovered

Seventy-five long-lost silent films uncovered in the New Zealand Film Archive vault, including the only known copy of legendary director John Ford's "Upstream," are being sent back to the United States to be restored.

Steve Russell, who works for the Film Archive, said the films were discovered when an American preservationist visited last year. Many had remained in New Zealand because distributors during the early days of filmmaking didn't want to pay return shipping costs, he said.

LISTEN UP, HOLLYWOOD: TV worth rebooting?

Hollywood doesn't exactly need any prodding these days to get it to turn old TV shows into movies. Still, Associated Press movie critic Christy Lemire has some (not serious, we hope) ideas she'd like to pitch to studio execs:

• "Jeopardy!": To make it even more interactive, people in the audience could throw fries at the screen whenever Alex Trebek pronounces a word in show-offy, perfect French.

• "Joan Rivers Classics Collection" on QVC: She's been peddling her line of jewelry and accessories through the home-shopping channel for about 20 years. Wouldn't it be more fun to see her sell her stuff with all the foul-mouthed candor of her stand-up routine?

• "Yule Log": It's a Christmas-morning staple at local television stations across the country: a shot of a piece of wood burning in a fireplace for hours on end while carols swell in the background. Now imagine spending Christmas morning watching it on the big screen. It would seem ... warmer somehow, right?

Metropolis The must-see movie of 1927 is now the must-see movie of 2010, restored to nearly its full length after 83 years of truncated versions. Fritz Lang's silent classic is more than ever one of the greatest, if daffiest, of sci-fi epics, with echoes that have rolled out to "Dr. Strangelove,'' "Star Wars,'' "Blade Runner,'' and beyond. Miss it at your peril. (149 min., unrated) (Ty Burr)

Modern horror films rarely capture that pit-of-the-stomach feeling the way this movie does. Zeman and Brancaccio deploy their share of horror-movie piano. But it helps that these two were raised in a climate of child-snatching paranoia. They know that it's what real that scares us: lynch mobs, legal loopholes, a crazy homeless man, talk of satanic cults, curfews, and the very simple fact that there is much that remains unsettled, including the implication of anything called Cropsey. It's a proper noun — the Hudson River School painter Jasper Francis Cropsey, for instance. But it also suggests "proxy,'' "patsy,'' "crackpot,'' "crock,'' and "crop circle.'' So a real Cropsey for Staten Islanders made for a surreal nightmare on their streets.